Chances are you or your organization have gigabytes (if not terabytes) of valuable data—whether they're photos or videos or archived projects—that you want to keep for a long time. Amazon Glacier is a new service providing this archival storage—for just a penny per GB a month.

Here's how it works:
When you sign up for Glacier, you create a "vault" to store your uploaded data (your "archive"). Glacier encrypts your data using AES-256 encryption. You can store up to 40 terabytes of data in each archive, and up to 1,000 vaults per region in your Amazon Web Services account. So basically, you shouldn't run out of room at any time soon.

Amazon says Glacier stores data with high durability—with an average annual durability of 99.999999999% per archive. Data integrity checks, self-healing, and storage redundancy also mean your data should stay safe for years.

How does it differ from Amazon's cheap S3 storage service? First, it's designed for archiving, so while S3 gives you rapid retrieval of your data, Glacier retrieval requests are queued, with archives available for downloading in 3 to 5 hours. You can also retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage on Glacier for free each month (the stuff you would store in these archives probably wouldn't need to be accessed frequently).

Glacier looks like a good solution for offsite backup of your archived data—things you are keeping off your hard drive on media like optical discs, tapes, or hard drives. We all know that hard drives and other storage media fail and can take a lot of work migrating to newer technologies.